What KPS Gill wrote in the context of Haneef case seems equally relevant in the case of Indian Express’s defence of Bombay blasts convicts:

“All generalisations are subject to exception, but it is increasingly the case that most media organisations in India have become propagandists, resorting to outright falsehoods, ‘sloganising’ every issue, routinely abusing and demonising particular parties, while others are shielded or exempted from even the most cursory examination or censure.

Thomas Jefferson once remarked that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. The deep ignorance of history, fact, process and law that characterises news organisations today – and most prominently the electronic media – has trivialised and distorted the gravest and most momentous concerns of our age, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between the power and reach of the media in India and its adherence to any acceptable standards of reportage and conduct.”

“None of these considerations have found much space in the frenetic reportage on the issue, which has been entirely prejudged. This has become a staple of successive media trials that have taken place on high profile cases in the recent past. In almost every case, a terrorist is never a terrorist – often even after he has been convicted, and his conviction upheld by a succession of courts, right up to the Supreme Court. On the other hand, we find that the police are always – with or without evidence – guilty of ‘human rights violations’ irrespective of the actual evidence, or of the procedural integrity of their actions.”

Are pro-Islamist interests at work in Indian Express? Pragati needs to do an analysis of how Indian media is being manipulated to subvert national interest.

More worryingly, this also seems to be a case of those who lost their case in the court using the media to influence our system of justice.

Oldtimer

What KPS Gill wrote in the context of Haneef case seems equally relevant in the case of Indian Express’s defence of Bombay blasts convicts:

“All generalisations are subject to exception, but it is increasingly the case that most media organisations in India have become propagandists, resorting to outright falsehoods, ‘sloganising’ every issue, routinely abusing and demonising particular parties, while others are shielded or exempted from even the most cursory examination or censure.

Thomas Jefferson once remarked that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. The deep ignorance of history, fact, process and law that characterises news organisations today – and most prominently the electronic media – has trivialised and distorted the gravest and most momentous concerns of our age, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between the power and reach of the media in India and its adherence to any acceptable standards of reportage and conduct.”

“None of these considerations have found much space in the frenetic reportage on the issue, which has been entirely prejudged. This has become a staple of successive media trials that have taken place on high profile cases in the recent past. In almost every case, a terrorist is never a terrorist – often even after he has been convicted, and his conviction upheld by a succession of courts, right up to the Supreme Court. On the other hand, we find that the police are always – with or without evidence – guilty of ‘human rights violations’ irrespective of the actual evidence, or of the procedural integrity of their actions.”